Delivering The Sitecore Experience

 Once you have successfully create an environment, you can go ahead and create your first site. In order to create a new Site, you need to launch the Sitecore Launchpad by clicking on the "XM Cloud Launchpad": Click on "Sites" menu to create a new Site: Click on "Add your first website" button to start the wizard. I chose the "Basic Site" template: Enter a Site name and pick a language and click on "Create website" button. You will see the following screen while your Site is being created: Once the Site is created, you can edit it in Pages or Explorer using the context menu: Explorer view of the Site: 1. "Details" view of page. 2. "Content" view of page: Unfortunately, trying to load the new Site in pages gives "Unable to connect to remote server"

 In order to create an instance of XM Cloud, you need to create an XM Cloud environment within you "Project" in XM Cloud Deploy. To get to XM Cloud Deploy, go to https://deploy.sitecorecloud.io/ and pick the project under which you would like to create an environment. If you have no environments instantiated you will see the following screen. Click on " Create new environment" to get started. All you need to do is provide a name for your environment and select a few options and click "Create". Once you click "Create" Sitecore XM Cloud Deploy will "Queue" you deployment: Once the deployment starts, you can see the status change to "In Progress": You can see additional details of the deployment process by clicking on "View deployment logs": Once the deployment successfully completes, you should see the following screen: \ In case you cancel you deployment before it completes, you will see something that looks like this...

In this post, we will see how we can deploy our very first instance of Sitecore XM Cloud. To get started with Sitecore Portal, please refer to part 1 of the series. To get started, log into https://portal.sitecorecloud.io/ and click on "Managed My Projects". This will launch the Sitecore XM Deploy app. Note that the Create New Project button is disabled as the partner account currently allows 2 projects. Ideally, this would be active is you are creating your first project. Once you click on the "Create new project" button, you are presented with a 7 step wizard. Step 0: Select an option    Step 1: Select a starter template Step 2: Project details Step 3: Deployment repository details GitHub is the default option. More options coming soon. Step 4: Template repository details Click on "Create a new GitHub connection" and you are redirected to log into you GitHub account and pick a repository to map to the project. Once the connection is established you will...

The biggest news of the year in the Sitecore community has been the arrival of Sitecore XM Cloud. In this blog series, I will be showing partner's access to XM Cloud. To get started, one needs to be invited to Sitecore Portal. You can access it at https://portal.sitecorecloud.io/.  Once you create an account and sign-in, you arrive at the following screen which has two main actions: Invite members  Managed projects (Sitecore XM Deploy) If you look closely you will see Sitecore Cloud Portal and XM Cloud Deploy. Invite team members opens up the following screen: "Manage My Projects" option launches the following window In the Part 2 , I will take us through deploying our first XM Cloud instance.

Had an awesome time at SUGON EU 2022 in Budapest. Here are the highlights of the event. Day 1 Event kick-off by Tamas Keynote by Steve Tzikakis Keynote by Dave O’Flanagan Product demo by Andy Cohen 3 breakouts Awards (Hackathon winner, no MVP awards) Community Quiz Day 2 Keynote by Pieter Brinkman & Jason St-Cyr – Architect’s Guide to SaaS migration 4 long breakouts 3 lightning breakouts Sitecore Discover product demo Product roadmap by Jake Hookom (OrderCloud) and Roger Conolly (StyleLabs) Keynote by Steve Tzikakis First public appearance in 18 months Doubled staff to 2200. Shooting for 3000 employees by next year Sitecore doubled R&D budget to 22%, 16% is industry’s highest spend New offices in Dubai, Riyad, Athens, Boston, Madrid and Milan Fully cloud based CMS by summer 2022 (~July) Content Hub positioned as Content Management Keynote by Dave O' Flanagan Sitecore DXP 2022 roadmap and beyond Big focus on XM Cloud & Jamstack (~7 sessions related to Jamstack/APIs) Fron...

Having introduced "composable" in part 1 , we will now look at deconstructing and decoupling the typical layers of a digital solution to understand how composability can be achieved within them. Let's assume a typical application is composed of the following four layers: Client UI - typical client UI to serve channels like web, mobile, email, Social, AR/VR, Kiosk Infrastructure - this includes networking, security, hosting, routing and other typical functions Platforms/products - Off-the-self, plug-and-play, pay-as-you-go, bespoke products and tools that offer packaged business capabilities (PCBs is another Gartner term) or business applications as well as persistence Data storage - storage and persistence for data and analytics. Enterprise Data Lakes, Collections DB etc. Non-composable version of a digital solution will still include these layers but they are siloed. Decomposing the digital solution into these basic layers is in other terms is achieved through decoupling...

 If you are in the business of building digital solutions, you may have come across the terms "Composable", "Composable Enterprise", "Composable Architecture", "Composable DXP"  "Composable Commerce" etc. I believe this was coined by Gartner in one of their publications couple of years ago and since then it has gained a lot of traction. But like most industry jargons, most readers tend to piece the topic together in their mind by associating the definition of the word with a function they perform professionally. For e.g. API-first . Every time I ask someone to define what API-first means, they then do offer a simple explanation which is to build APIs first before building UI or something similar. While there may be nothing wrong with that definition, API-first much more than that. for e.g. developing an API description language . So, I thought it may be a good idea to dig a bit deeper into "Composable" and perhaps offer a fram...